I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium, one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

Microsoft Shows Obamacare How To Deal With Bad Software

As the ACA (aka Obamacare) health care exchange disaster rumbles on it’s worth noting how the private sector deals with bad software. Or if you prefer, software that needs rather a lot of repair and tweaking before being ready for prime time. This is what has just happened to MicrosoftMicrosoft, the update to Windows RT 8.1 for the Surface tablet simply wasn’t right. So, they’ve pulled it from distribution and won’t release again until they have got it right:

Microsoft is having trouble updating machines to Windows RT 8.1. The company has taken the update offline, preventing people from upgrading their RT devices. In a statement published on Microsoft’s support forums, the company says it is “investigating a situation affecting a limited number of users updating their Windows RT devices to Windows RT 8.1. As a result, we have temporarily removed the Windows RT 8.1 update from the Windows Store.”

If it doesn’t work then stop people using it. Take it all away and repair it and only let people use it again when it’s right. This is really what should be happening with the Federal health care exchange. The software seems sufficiently borked that it’s going to be very difficult indeed to repair it on the fly. Quite apart from anything else too much time is going to be spent just trying to keep the site going as it is when that time could be much better spent in an environment where the site is down and it can be properly repaired/rewritten.

Yes, I am indeed aware that the is a political non-starter: but this is a blog about technical and business issues, not about political ones.

For those who want to insist that it’s only just teething problems with the site then I recommend a read of this Reddit thread. No one’s got access to the full code of the site but a great deal can be divined without having that. Yes, that’s an old discussion from the first few days of the site running but the complaints being made are indeed indicative that it’s a design problem, not just a few scraps of stray code that can be cleaned up and everything will be fine.

And in order to be positive, offer something useful in this situation, here’s how one highly skilled developer would have done it:

Now we think about launch. We realise that our website and backends are going to have bugs, and the most likely place for these bugs is in the rules evaluation and feeds to insurers. As such, we want to detect and nail these bugs before they cause widespread problems. What I’d do is, at least 1 month in advance of our planned country-wide launch, launch this site for one of the smaller states – say, Wyoming or Vermont which have populations around 500K – and announce that we will apply a one-off credit of $100 per individual or $200 per family to users from this state purchasing insurance. Ballpark guess: these credits will cost around $10M which is incredibly cheap for a live test. We provision the crap out of our system and wait for the flood of applications, expect things to break, and measure our actual load and resources consumed. We are careful about user account creation – we warn users to expect their account creation letters within 10 days, and deliberately stagger sending them so we have a gradual trickle of users onto the site. We have a natural limit of users on the site due to our address validation. Obviously, we find bugs – we fix them as best we can, and ensure we have a solid suite of regression testing that will catch the bugs if they re-occur in future. The rule is “demonstrate, make a test that fails, fix, ensure the test passes.”

Once we’re happy that we’ve found all the bugs we can, we open it to another, larger, state and repeat…..

Don’t go national until you’ve done proper testing on real data. Have a rolling release. There’s more very good advice in there too (like, for example, why on earth aren’t they using a cloud supplier for the basic servers? They know absolutely that at some points in the year they will have vast traffic, at others virtually none.) and all of it appears to be entirely the opposite of what was actually done.

The more we find out about that website the more convinced I am that it’s just not going to get fixed in time for the launch of the actual insurance coverage at the turn of the year. They could surprise me this is true and for the sake of the plan I hope they do. But I think that it’s deeply unlikely.

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